First stone-tipped spear thrown earlier than thought

THE hunt for food led hominins to cast the first stone, so to speak, half a million years ago - 200,000 years earlier than we thought. The oldest evidence yet of stone-tipped spears suggests it was neither our species nor Neanderthals who pioneered such weapons, but our shared ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis.

We knew that H. heidelbergensis fashioned wooden spears, says Jayne Wilkins at the University of Toronto, Canada, but evidence for stone-tipped weapons was lacking. Stone points from spears had been found only at sites associated with Neanderthals or archaic members of our species, and not more than 300,000 years old.

That gives huge significance to the discovery by Wilkins's team of a hoard of stone points between 4 and 9 centimetres long. Unearthed in 500,000-year-old deposits at Kathu Pan in South Africa, they are the right shape and size for use on spears. Some have fractured tips, suggesting they were used as weapons (Science, doi.org/jsq).

Crucially, the points show signs of having been resharpened to maintain their symmetry. That is characteristic of spear tips and not of handheld cutting tools. The latter typically become less symmetrical with use because only the side of the tool used for cutting is kept sharp.

The find does more than just extend the prehistory of stone-tipped spears - it puts those first spears firmly in the hands of H. heidelbergensis, Wilkins says. Modern foragers use such weapons to take down large game during cooperative, strategic hunts. Perhaps our ancestor did so too.

"The spears are evidence for the deep accumulation of hunting behaviours in our lineage," Wilkins says. Use of the spears may have taken off as H. heidelbergensis acquired a bigger brain, she adds.

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